if you were in love with someone, would you tell them? [20:4]
The first evening, Elizabeth is mostly tired. The days leading up had been busy; the flight wasn't too bad but she would've liked to spend some of it sleeping and it just hadn't worked out that way. She spends it in a half-awake kind of quiet daze, drinks wine and rests her head against Nathan's shoulder, goes to bed early and sleeps late just because she can for the first time in months. Even the ... minor matter of the automatae's presence isn't enough of a concern to rouse her to anything.
(After all, if Hephaistos wants them to keep an eye on her, there's probably all of no point in making a fuss about it. They beat her here and Nathan evidently hadn't thought it was so worrying.)
The first morning, then, she mostly spends unpacking her suitcases and poking around the villa to get a feel for the place. There's a pool, outside, just like Nathan told her, prompting well-intentioned offers of oiling her back from the golden women who'd carried her palanquin. She declines.
Quietly content is a good and easy thing to be -- here, with him. By the second day she's drifting around the villa in one of those swimsuits she emailed him pictures of and a shirt that she didn't bring, mildly surprised by her own willingness to relax. She overanalyzes things often, picks them apart in her head, doesn't come to any conclusions and doesn't offer any of her thoughts...which burst out later, unexpectedly. Like, when I love you sounds more like a promise not to be angry and tired forever than anything particularly tender. Romantic declarations are not the way of things, when they could just spend impromptu afternoons in bed and breakfasts she didn't know were there or give the first ballet performance she's tried in a decade. When she's not sure how much he feels about her and tells herself it doesn't matter to stop from asking.
Which is why when there are hands on her hips and she leans back into him, comfortable with the slow pace of things, the last thing she's expecting to be whispered into her hair is: "I love you, Elizabeth."
Mr Sinister the cavy gives her a mournful look as his master bolts for the pool. She doesn't notice as she scrambles around to give chase, though that those feelings are mutual is poignantly displayed by the fact she puts up with a cavy named Mr Sinister.
Patient Name: Elizabeth Weir
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis (AU)
Word Count: 408
Patient's Partner: Nathan Scaevola (X-Men movieverse)